When Darkness Loves Us
Elizabeth Engstrom
Published by Apex Publications at Smashwords
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This collection is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Justin Stewart
When Darkness Finds Us/Beauty Is...
Copyright 1984, 2009 by Elizabeth Engstrom
Original Forward 1984 by Theodore Sturgeon
Updated Forward 2009 by Elizabeth Engstrom
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com
www.elizabethengstrom.com
DEDICATION
To Michael and Bill
and Evan
Foreword to the 2009 edition
The original publication of this book marked the genesis of my professional career in writing, editing, publishing, and teaching the fine art of fiction. Before that, I had always known I would some day write—even envisioned my name on the spine of my book when I was eight, nine, ten years old. When old enough to have something to say, and finally given the opportunity of sufficient free time, write I did. This was the first publication-quality work I produced, and with the help of my dear friend and mentor, the late science fiction great Theodore Sturgeon, this book launched my career.
Twenty-five years later, I’ve learned much about storytelling. Deb Taber, my editor for this volume, wanted to know if I wanted to rewrite any sections, but after all this time, I would have to rewrite everything...or nothing. So we present it here as it was in its original form, with only minor tweaks. It is a view back to a simpler time, when I was filled with innocence, enthusiasm and starry-eyed dreams of my career as an author.
Twenty-five years later, I have made my living as a working writer, all I ever aspired to be from the time I wrote my first short story at age eight. From the point of view of certain of my students, my success has been wildly outrageous, and from another point of view, my success has been modest at best. But when it comes to my career, my point of view is the only one that matters, and I have and have had, for me, the perfect career. I publish enough to pay the bills. I continue to collect enough rejection slips to keep me humble. I teach enough to keep sharpening my skill, and to commune on a meaningful level with other members of my profession. We are an irreverent bunch, socially inappropriate for the most part and filled with good will.
Twenty-five years later, the stories I tell today are much different from the two in this volume. I still write dark fantasy, but I also write other types of dark fiction, in both novel and short story form, along with inspirational essays, articles, limericks, egregiously bad love sonnets, and everything else that, given time, a working writer with varied interests is likely to produce. But the experience of growing older has, of course, changed me. And so it has changed the things that are important for me to say.
Twenty-five years later I am thrilled to see this volume back in print. I leave the dedication as it was, and add to it the names of Theodore Sturgeon and Al Cratty, one man who shaped my career and the other who shapes my life.
--Elizabeth Engstrom
Eugene, Oregon 2009
Foreword to the Original Edition
I wish you could have been there. Yes, I mean you. Let me tell you where, and why.
My wife, whom you’ll call Lady Jayne as soon as you see her—as I did—my wife and I had come to an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to teach writing. We entered a huge room in a house that overlooked macadamia and can fields, and was surrounded by papaya and banana trees and a symphonic riot of flowers; and there we met our class.
And Betsy.
Pretty exotic. Oh sure—Maui with its puffs of rain cloud and the dark flanks of its sleeping volcanoes wearing their rumpled capes of pool-table felt, its long-tailed firebirds and impudent mynas, its kaleidoscopic ethnics and accents, and its unfailing—what—smilingness: It’s exotic all right.
Except Betsy.
Elizabeth Engstrom is not exotic. She is a married woman with a nice husband and two great kids and a tidy home and a quiet voice with which she would no more shout than she would ride a motorcycle into one’s living room. She spoke seldom during the course we taught; when she did, it was to the point and rather noticeably her own opinion and none other, prevailing or not. Her greatest eloquence, which we both noticed from that first entrance, was a pair of eyes two clicks brighter than the brightest you have ever seen. These transmitted something quite beyond words—an intensity to learn and to understand and to do. This woman meant to get into print. Revise that. I shouldn’t have said “intensity”; I should have said “ferocity.”
This class was extraordinary. None had seen print; at this writing six of them are writing and selling, and much as we’d like to take credit, we must assert that all we had to do was scratch lightly and the talent exploded all over the place.
We workshopped manuscripts. (Workshop has become a verb.) Betsy’s twenty-odd-thousand-word story had to be put off while we went through the maze of story architecture, mood, crisis/climax/denouement, the “sound” of punctuation and all that machine-shop stuff, until the last meeting, when we had Betsy read her story aloud.
It was When Darkness Loves Us.
It was for this moment that I wish you had been there. There is a thing that happens in theater when one or another of the cast is having “his” or “her” night—a very special spell that overtakes a performer; you can tell when it’s happening by two things. One, you become aware that everyone else in the cast is playing to and for the magicked one. And two, when the final curtain falls, instead of the appreciative crash of applause, there is an instant of hush before anyone moves. It’s the possibility of that hush that keeps actors—actors.
Well, that’s what happened at that reading.
Later, on the mainland, we got a look at Beauty Is... Our immediate reaction was to get it launched. The two stories together made a generous-enough bookful, but they were not connected in any way. Betsy said I was crazy but I said, “Do it.” Her able agent said I was crazy but I said, “Do it.” Her publisher probably thought the same...but the publisher did it.
And now I envy you, and anyone else who has not, but who is about to, meet Elizabeth Engstrom. Behind that soft-voiced style is power, is surprise, is—well, that ferocity I mentioned.
You are now introduced.
--Theodore Sturgeon
Oregon, 1984
Acknowledgements
A writer needs sustenance in many ways during differing phases of a work. Of these, I believe, dialogue is the most nourishing. I have been fortunate.
Lifeblood was contributed by Clarice Cox, Ted and Jayne Sturgeon, Maggie Doran, Madge Walls, Marie Johnson, Tonia Baney, and Shelley Nalepa, to name only a few.
Thanks to John Briley for accuracy, Sandra Dijkstra for direction, and to Ted Sturgeon for the right hug at the right time.
And a note of specific gratitude to my folks, for teaching me that molds are for plastic.
When Darkness Loves Us
Part One
1
Sally Ann Hixson, full with the blush of spring and gleeful playfulness as only sixteen-year-olds know it, hid around the side of the huge tree at the edge of the woods as the great tractor drove past her. She saw her husband, torso bare, riding the roaring monster, his smooth muscles gliding under sweat-slick skin tanned a deep brown. She didn’t want him to see her...not yet.
She plopped down into the long grass, feeling the rough bark of the big tree against her back as she gazed into the woods. This had been her favorite place to play when she was little. She could just barely see her parents’ house on the hill about a mile off. Her mother had noticed her restlessness as soon as the major canning was done and sent her away to run, to play, to spy on her new husband as he worked with her father in the fields.
This summer, they would build their house on the other hill, and they could raise their family to be good country folk, just like their fathers and their fathers before them. She stretched her legs into a sunbeam, feeling them warm under her new jeans. She had a wild impulse to cast off her clothes and run naked through the grass. She thought of Michael then, and their delicious lovemaking the night before. She was not able to give of herself very freely while in her parents’ house, but some nights Michael took her by the hand and led her out to the hill where their hose would soon be built, high up on the knoll, and with the moon watching and the cicadas playing the romantic background music, they would make love; uninhibited, wonderful love. They explored each other’s bodies and released sensations unfamiliar to either of them, with joy and togetherness in discovering the full potentials of their sexuality.
The idea made her tingle, then blush, and she crossed her legs, thinking of the times her thoughts strayed to such matters when she was with her mother. It was worse then, because she was sure lovemaking was not like that for her parents, and sometimes she had to excuse herself and go into the bathroom until she could stop grinning.
She picked up a long strand of grass and put it between her teeth as she peeked around the tree and watched her man, handsome and tousled, drive the machine over the next hill. She glanced around one more time to make sure her pest of a little sister wasn’t lurking somewhere in the shadows. She jumped up and followed the edge of the woods until she could see the flatbed truck where her father waited. Michael would stop there and have a glass of iced water that she had put in a thermos jug for him that morning. She saw him turn to look behind him, so she dodged back into the woods...and saw the stone steps that led down into the ground.
It was so familiar. She used to play here when she was small, but she hadn’t come here in years. There were two brand-new doors with shiny hinges mounted to the concrete, and she knew that it was going to be sealed against children and mishaps forever. What used to be the attraction here so long ago? She remembered the darkness and a tunnel, and she stepped down to the first step, then the second one, looking into a black hole that had no end.
It was cool, but not cold, and she took the sweatshirt that was tied around her waist and slipped it over her shoulders. She continued down into the eerie darkness and tried to remember the story about this place. A hiding place for runaway slaves, maybe. She continued her descent. The steps were sturdy, stone set in concrete. She felt her way along with her hand, the rough rock cool to the touch. The steps were narrow, set at an easy angle, and as she glanced back to reassure herself of the warm spring day above, she noticed that the entrance to the stairs would be out of sight before she reached the bottom. Yet down she went.
At the bottom there was a hole in the side of the wall, and memories, just out of reach, began to form themselves in her mind. She wondered if any of the old playthings were still in the tunnel. She crouched down to enter. Once inside, she straightened up—the tunnel was quite large. The small amount of light afforded by the entry provided very little visibility, but she made her way slowly along the tunnel until the toe of her tennis shoe struck something that went ringing into the darkness. It was a baby spoon. The light glinted off the surface, just enough for her to find it. She picked it up, suddenly remembering the nursery rhymes and the frightening pleasure of having tea parties in such a forbidden place.
She rubbed the spoon between her fingers: tiny, smooth, and round, with a handle that doubled back upon itself, big enough for her finger. Then she remembered Jackie, killed in Vietnam. They’d been inseparable, always knew they’d eventually marry, and she had cried when he went off to the army. But now Jackie was gone and Michael was up there, and she had better go surprise him before she missed her chance. With one more thought of Jackie and a prayer for his soul, she moved back to the sun and the springtime.
She heard Michael’s voice above the roar of the idling tractor just as she came through the hole in the wall, caught the last words of his sentence. Angry that he had found her before she could surprise him, she had started running up the stairs when the doors above slammed shut, cutting off all light, and the sound of a padlock’s shank driving home pierced her heart. She stood stock-still. The walls instantly closed in around her, and the air disappeared. She managed one scream, drowned by the earth-vibrating essence of the great engine above. She gasped, stumbled up one more step, then fell to her knees, fighting for breath, trying desperately to repress the horror of being locked in the darkness, while Michael’s last words reverberated in her mind: “...before one of my kids falls down there.”
Chest heaving, she tried to crawl up the stairs, fingers clawing, capable only of breathless moans rather than the strong screams she was trying desperately to utter in a vain attempt to bring father and husband to her rescue. She convulsed in fear, fingers stiffening, back arching. A muscular spasm turned her onto her back; the stone steps dug deeper into her spine, and the darkness moved in and took over her mind.
2
The awakening was slow, starting with the pain in her lower back, then in her fingers, followed by the throbbing in her head. Slowly she opened her eyes. Darkness. She felt her eyes with her fingers to see if they were open or if she was dreaming. She felt the cold stone steps beneath her. Then she remembered. She looked around, but could see absolutely nothing. On her hands and knees, she mounted the steps until her head touched the heavy wooden doors, and she remembered the shiny new hinges and the solid, heavy wood that wouldn’t rot as the seasons changed.
It must be night, she thought, or surely I could see a crack of daylight somewhere. She felt alone, isolated, abandoned. Tears leaked out the corners of her eyes as she focused all her panic and shot it to her husband, hoping that somewhere there was a God who would transmit the message to him, so he could sense her surroundings and come rescue her and take her home to their warm, soft bed.
She pushed on the door with her shoulders, and it didn’t give at all. She lost hope of wiggling the hinges loose. Cold and afraid, she huddled on the first steps, knowing that soon Michael and her dad would be coming for her. It was the only possible place she could be. After she had been missing for a night, they would come looking for her here. And here should be, brave (not really) and okay (barely) and so very glad to see them. She fought the claustrophobic feeling and tried to relax. She was desperately tired and uncomfortable. She put her head on her arms and slept.
When she awoke, it was still pitch dark and she had to go to the bathroom. She couldn’t’ be embarrassed by the foul smells of her own excretions when her husband came to rescue her, so she had to find some place to go. Slowly, with aching muscles, she moved crablike down the stairs, visualizing in her mind’s eye the hole in the wall and the tunnel thereafter. She crouched, feeling the circumference of the hole so she wouldn’t hit her head, and slipped through to the big tunnel.
She remembered that it ran wide and true to where she had picked up the spoon, and she took brave steps in the darkness. She remembered Jackie, talking to her when they were out walking in the countryside on dark, moonless nights. “You’ll never stumble if you walk boldly and pick your feet up high.” It had worked then, and it worked now. She walked through the darkness and the fear until she sensed by the echoes around her that the tunnel took a turn to the right. In the corner, she relieved herself.
Nothing could be worse than waiting at the top of the steps, so she decided to explore the tunnel just a little farther and exercise the kinks out of her legs. The tunnel wound around until she was certain she must be directly under the stairs; then it straightened again. Her breathing echoed off the walls in eerie rasps. She walked still farther, and the air turned cooler. It smelled different. Water. Suddenly overcome with thirst, she walked boldly and entered a large cavern. The change in acoustics was immediate. She felt small and lost after the intimacy of the tunnel. Pebbles crunched underfoot.
She picked up a handful of loose stones and began tossing them around her to get a bearing on the dimensions of the cavern. It was huge. A path seemed to continue right through it, water on both sides. Slowly she stepped off the right side of the path, taking baby steps down into the darkness until her tennis shoe splashed in water. She lifted a cupped handful to her nose, then tasted it. Delicious. Eagerly, with both feet in the water, she drank her fill.
Wouldn’t Dad be surprised, she thought, to know of this underwater lake on his property? The water tasted like the cave smelled—mossy—but it seemed pure, and it did the trick. She splashed some on her face, stood up, and dried her hands on her sweatshirt.
Feeling far more comfortable, she picked up another handful of pebbles and started throwing them. On this side of the path was a small pond, but the lake on the other side seemed endless. She threw a rock as far as she could, and still it plopped into the water. She threw another to the side, and it splashed. She threw another and there was no sound. Her heart froze. Maybe it had landed on a moss island. She threw one more in roughly the same direction and heard it land with a plop, and she visualized the concentric circles of black ripples edging out toward her.
She walked along the path, humming away the discomfort, spraying pebbles in wide sweeping arcs. The sound was friendly. Pebbles gone, she continued walking until she could feel the cavern narrowing back into a tunnel, and it was then that she heard the splash behind her. A small splash, as if one of the pebbles had been held up from its fate, suspended, until it finally fell. She stopped, mid-step, and listened. The darkness pressed in upon her, and she could hear her blood rush through her veins. Silence. She had resumed her walk, stepping quietly, when another splash came, closer behind her, and her mind again was seized with unparalleled terror. She froze. A third noise, a sucking sound coming from the water just inches away from her feet, made her start. Moans of panic churning up unbidden, she ran blindly until she stumbled and collided at a turn with the wall of the tunnel. She wildly felt her way around the turn and continued running the length of it until the cave with its lake and resident monster were far behind her.
She stopped for breath, the tunnel becoming a close friend. She was sure of the walls around her, and there were only two directions to be concerned with. Still her heart pounded. She leaned against the wall of the tunnel in despair. The darkness was terrifying. She could dimly see some kind of tracers in front of her eyes as she passed her hand in front of her face, but could not make out even the shapes of her fingers. Her eyes ached from trying. The tears were a long time coming, beginning first with shuddering whimpers, then great, racking soul-filled sobs. The hopelessness of the situation was overwhelming. There was no point in going on, and she could not go back past the creature in the lake. Just the thought of going back made her want to vomit. She would stay right there until she starved to death. Exhausted by the scare, the run, and the cry, eventually she slept.
She dreamed of Michael. They were running together through the waist-high grass, laughing. He tripped her, and holding her so she would not fall too hard, he came down on top of her, his face so close, and he moved as if to kiss her. Instead, he said, “You’re going to rot down there, aren’t you?”
She awoke with a piercing scream that echoed back to her again and again and again, so that even after she had stopped, she had to put her hands to her ears to keep out the terrible noise. She sat straight up, looking ahead at the darkness. “Oh, God.” Her soul wrenched inside of her. “NO!” she shouted. “I WON’T rot down here! I WILL SURVIVE!” The loud sound of her voice set her heart pounding again, and she started to think clearly. The decision to survive created bravery in her, and she wanted to make a plan. She knew now that she would survive until she was rescued.
Shelter. That was a laugh. No problem. Because it was a bit warm, she rolled up her jeans to just below the knee. She certainly wasn’t going to freeze. She stood and tied the sweatshirt again around her waist. Food. Now that was a problem. And she was definitely hungry. Water. If there was one lake, there must be another. Or a stream. She would continue down these tunnels until she found what she needed and then found a way out of here. She couldn’t wait to be discovered. Where there was water, there was most likely food. Fish! Probably the monster in the lake was nothing more than a couple of fish, their long-undisturbed life in the lake interrupted by the stones. Maybe she could catch a fish to eat.
She thought back to her science books, to pale, sickly fish with bulging blind eyes and horrendous teeth that lived so deep in the ocean that no light penetrated their lair, and she shuddered. So much for the fish. She’d have to eat them raw anyway. No good. Moss, maybe. Seaweed was supposed to be good for you; maybe moss was just as good. Maybe, also, there was a way out of here. She got up and started down the tunnel, thinking as she went, trying to ignore the gnawing in her belly that would soon, very soon, have to be satisfied.
She walked on, wondering how long she’d been there, wondering how long it would be until she heard Michael’s booming voice. She would keep track of time with marks on the cave wall, but that was pretty silly, because she wouldn’t be able to see them. By the number of times she slept? No good. By her menstrual periods? Nonsense. She would never be here a whole month, and besides that, she hadn’t had a period in the two months she and Michael had been married.
No matter how bravely she told herself that things were going to be all right, now she had two doubts nagging the back of her mind.
She walked until her legs were leaden; then she sat and slept and walked some more. There must be miles and miles of tunnel in here. She crossed two streams, both of which had water seeping from one wall, crossing the floor of the tunnel, and leaking out the other side. Barely enough to drink—she would put her lips to the wall and suck up what moisture was needed to keep the dangerous thirst away. She knew, too, that if she didn’t find something to eat soon, she would no longer have the energy to look. Her jeans were a little baggy on her already slim frame and her steps were slower and not always in a straight line.
Sleeping when tired, she made her way through the endless tunnel with its twistings and turnings, her hands raw from catching herself after stumbling over the uneven flooring as her steps began to drag. After countless naps, with weak legs, bleeding and blistered, she tripped over a rise in the tunnel floor and lay there, her will almost gone, overcome by thirst and hunger, so tired, wanting that final sleep that would bring peace.
In half consciousness, her brain fevered and delirious, she cried out “Michael!” and her voice reverberated off the walls of a large cavern. Then she heard water dripping.
She crawled painfully toward the sound and found a pool of water, cold and delicious. She lay on her stomach and drank from her hands until she was full. It was in the half sleep that followed that Jackie came to her and brought her food. She heard his voice and looked up. He stood over her, his face illuminated in the darkness by a glow, a radiance. “Eat these, Sally Ann. They’re good for you.” She picked one up. It was a fat slug, slippery on one side and rough on the other side, about the size of her thumb.
“I can’t eat this.”
“You can. It’s good for you. You have to. Pop the whole thing in your mouth like a cherry tomato and bite once, then swallow. It’s easy. Here. Try.”
Too tired to feel revulsion, she put the slug into her mouth and chomped down hard. She felt it burst, squirting down her throat, and she swallowed quickly, followed by a handful of cold water. Yuck. It tasted awful. He encouraged her to eat more, and she did. She finished all those he had brought her and, stomach full, slept where she lay.
3
“Jackie?”
“Hmmm?”
“Are you a ghost?”
“I don’t know.”
The question had burned in her mind since she had first seen him the day he’d saved her. Fearing the worst—that she was mad—she had promised herself not to ask the question until he had been with her for a while.
“Well, how did you come to be here? And why can I see you when I can’t even see my hands in front of my face?”
“I don’t know that either, Sally Ann. All I know is that I was in Vietnam, and we were carrying the wounded back to the camp. There was a yell and some sniper fire. I got hit in the chest...and the next thing I knew was that you were dying and I had to find some food for you to eat. I can see you, too, you know. It is pretty strange.”
“The Vietnam war ended more than five years ago, Jackie. You were killed there.”
This bit of news seemed no surprise to him. They sat in the main cavern with their backs up against the wall, comfortable on a mattress of soft dry moss that Sally had gathered for their bed. Her pregnancy was confirmed—there was no other explanation for the growing bulge in her belly—and she had stopped wearing her jeans long ago.
It had taken her a long time to recover, but Jackie had helped nurse her back to health. His devotion to her and the baby she carried helped her accept the fact that unless Michael found his way to her, she was stuck for the time being. The resiliency of youth healed her body and her mind. She adapted to her new surroundings as best she could, and as time went on, she pined less and less for her family.
Jackie urged her on, and together they explored the immediate regions of their homestead, discovered many large tunnels and smaller tributaries. One led to a swift-running stream, and it was here that Sally made her toilet. Another entered a monstrous cavern like a hollowed-out mountain, with sheer drops of hundreds or more feet, as she estimated by dropping rocks from their ledges.
A smaller cavern revealed what seemed to be thousands of skeletons. The final resting place, Sally Ann speculated, of all those slaves trying to escape. How long did they search for a way out before they sat down together and starved to death? What a terrible way to die. Lost, sightless, terrified. Their remains were a fortunate discovery, however, for from these bones Jackie and Sally fashioned plenty of useful tools—bowls, knives, awls, and supports. It also reaffirmed her will to survive.
This same cavern yielded mushrooms of many flavors. Sally found the mushroom patch by stepping on the spongy fungi as she walked carefully around, searching the area. Just as she found the mushrooms, Jackie discovered a tough, razorlike lichen growing around the walls. Sally had begun the dangerous habit of tasting everything that smelled okay. She couldn’t help herself. Sometimes the cravings were just too intense. The mushrooms didn’t hurt her, and when she soaked the lichen, it too became palatable.
It was strange how she could see Jackie as he worked; he seemed so old, so smart. The only time her eyes hurt her now was when she was exploring a new region, straining vainly to see where she was stepping. Sometimes she just closed them and wandered. It made no difference. She could see Jackie and nothing else, eyes open or closed.
She still became frightened, especially when Jackie went away. He went off on exploration trips of his own at times, mostly when he sensed she needed to be alone. The fear was not of the caverns, though, nor of monsters (even though the lake creature continued to haunt her dreams) or bogeymen. The fear seeped in when she was reflecting on her past life—Michael, her mother, father, and sister. The fear told her that she would be here until she died, that her child and its father would never meet. When the fear came, and she started to pant with the physical effect, and her eyes bulged in the darkness, looking from side to side trying to find a way out, Jackie would come back and sit with her, and soon the calm would descend. They became very close.
There was always plenty of food. Sally had merely to pick the slugs from the walls, wash them in the pond, and eat. There was also a kind of kelp that grew on the edges of the rocks in the water and on the sides of the tunnel where the water ran down, and now and then a fish would float up, and she would ravenously eat it, bones and all.
The water level fluctuated, dramatically at times. Sometimes when they went to sleep the water would be low, but when they awoke, it would reach almost to their bed. Now and then they would find things floating in it: apples sometimes showed up, even a cabbage once; frequently there were walnuts and an occasional dead rodent, all of which added to an adequate diet.
Their bed was comfortable, they were dry, clean, warm, fed, and together. And it was at times like this that they philosophized about their predicament—she being both grateful and angry.
Sally Ann was a fairly responsible sort of a girl, level headed and born with an instinct to roll with the punches. That’s how she felt about their situation. They had to make the best of it. What concerned her most, though, was the birth of her child. What to name him? How to keep from losing him in the dark? Jackie seemed convinced it was to be a son, and Sally Ann had taken a liking to the name Clinton. It was a solid name, and had enough hard sounds to make it easily understood when she had to call to him in the darkness.
Jackie’s undying cheerfulness helped chase away what blues came and went; he was totally unwilling to look at the negative side of things or talk of despair. They lay close together at sleep time and chased away the bad dreams. He even cut her hair. A tortuous process. Her blond hair was thin and she had always worn it quite long, but in the time they spent in the underworld it had grown much too long to be manageable. It was always getting in her way and washing it was quite out of the question. She lay with her neck on her jeans, her head on a boulder; with a sharp rock, Jackie sawed away at her hair, wearing it through more than cutting it. The end result felt uneven and strange, but more comfortable.
The baby grew rapidly, and in the last days, it was too dangerous to be awkwardly stumbling around in the darkness. She confined herself to her moss mattress and contemplated Michael.
Again and again she would lapse into despair until Jackie came to lift her spirits. He told her how he had delivered babies for women in ‘nam, said he was experienced, that there was nothing to it, and though she didn’t believe him, he talked to her in his calm, low voice until she was convinced there was nothing to fear.
But when the time came, when the pains wracked her whole body and her water broke, and she began to cry and scream and writhe on her bed, she wished for Dr. Stirling and his warm, confident hands. But Jackie was there, and he talked to her—rubbed her back between contractions and spoke of the coming baby and what a joy it would be. She thought of how happy it would make Michael to know that he had a baby, and she gritted her teeth and bore the pain and finally bore the baby. It emerged screaming and choking, and the reverberations in the cavern were joyous to hear.
She lifted the baby, warm and slippery, to her belly, and her hands moved over it to reassure herself that it was real, that it was whole and had all its parts. She discovered that it was indeed a son. Jackie brought her water in a skull bowl, and with the baby at her breast, they tied the umbilical cord with her shoelaces and severed it with a sharpened bone. He helped her deliver the afterbirth, which he put away to eat later, then cleaned up around them. He brought the fresh moss that had been stockpiled for the occasion, then lay down beside mother and son, and enshrouded in darkness, they all slept.
4
“I’m cold, Mommy.”
“Well then, silly, come out of the water and I’ll dry you off.”
Tall as his mother’s shoulder, Clint came dripping out of the pond and stood shivering by her side. She rubbed him briskly with a handful of soft dry moss to help restore the circulation, then pulled him down to her lap. They sat together, rocking back and forth, naked, she appreciating the coolness of his body as he appreciated the warmth of hers. They were very close, too close at times, she thought, but she constantly had to reevaluate her standards. In such an abnormal situation, she had to trust her judgment. His mouth automatically groped for her breast, and he gently sucked on it as they sat together. Her milk had dried up long ago, but this closeness was very important.
His little body was hard, muscular, compact, with just a little potbelly protruding, and though he was small, he was strong. She often wondered about his physical development without the sun. He seemed healthy, and he certainly was happy. A joy to her, even though she had never seen his face.
“Tell me again about sun and sky.”
When he was a baby, Sally Ann had told him stories about his father and the place where she had lived above ground, and he never tired of hearing about the sun and the sky, the plants, meadows, fruits, and delicious things of nature.
“Morning time is when the sun comes up in the sky and makes everything bright and you can see for miles. There are woods by where my parents live, and acres and acres of wheat fields. Your daddy works in those fields and his skin is tanned and brown. He eats sweet jam that I made for him before I came here to have you.”
“What’s ‘see’ again?”
“It’s another sense, honey. Like feeling or tasting or smelling. Listen. Hear that water drip? Well, if you go put our hand under it you can feel the drop, and if you could see it, it would look like a tiny jewel, a little precious piece of sunlight captured in the water. Someday you will see it. Someday your daddy will come down here and find us and take us back up to the farm and you’ll be able to run in the sunlight.”
“I wish he’d come soon, Mommy.”
“Me too, honey.” Her heart went out to this perfect child who didn’t understand what seeing was, who didn’t know the wonders of life and nature.
Sally Ann gathered up their things and started back to the main cavern that had been their home since Clint had been born. Born to the darkness, he was naturally oriented, and ran ahead of her, totally unafraid, at peace with the elements of his underworld life. She walked along slowly. She knew that she was planting a few seeds of dissatisfaction when she talked to him of the aboveground world that he longed to see the magic things that she talked of, but how else was she to explain life to him? And she did believe that one day they would be discovered and taken back.
He was a very independent boy, and he had thoughts of his own about the world above. Sally Ann could tell he doubted that everything she talked about existed. She could hardly blame him. How could he believe in the sun when he had never even used his eyes? When she stopped to think about it, as she did now, it saddened her. She wanted all the experiences of life to be his: to run and play in the meadow, to hear the birds, to see the stars. I guess it’s a little like believing in God, she thought. One has to believe, and then belief becomes strengthened. If one disbelieves, then disbelief is strengthened. And turning your back, once you know the truth, leads to evil.
She showed him her tennis shoes in an attempt to pique his curiosity, but he wasn’t interested. And there wasn’t anything she could do but accept it, was there?
When Clint was far enough ahead of her, she called to Jackie and he joined her on her walk. Clint couldn’t see or hear Jackie, so he reserved his visiting time for Sally alone after Clint was asleep. Many times they discussed for hours the best way to help Clint understand. Sally was confident that he was growing up to be a normal boy. He delighted in finding new kinds of life in the caves, some of which they gratefully added to their diet—like the crayfish that blindly lived in the fast-running streams—and some of which provided hours of entertainment for Clint—like the dim-witted puff-fish that would let him pick them up and transport them from one pond to another and back again. He played war games with them, playfully pitting one against the other, with food as the supreme reward. They seemed, in their cold, reptilian way, to be almost affectionate to him. But then, he was always kind to them.
Clint was crossing the swift stream on the stepping stones when he first discovered the crayfish. He was chewing one of a handful of slugs when one slipped out between his fingers just at the edge of the stream and he heard it splash into the water. The water began boiling with activity, and unafraid as he was, he reached in and pulled out a crayfish as long as his arm.
Jackie said that as long as it ate what you ate, it should be okay for you to eat it. So they shelled it and discovered that it was delicious. Sally Ann couldn’t quite get over her fear of putting her hand right into the black water, though Clint teased her about it, but she was grateful that he would bring her those delectable treats now and then.
Yes, he was a joy to her, but in her times alone she wondered many things. What would happen to him if she died? Was she glorifying the outside world to him so that he would never rest until he saw it? Was there a way out of here? She and Jackie had searched the tunnels and caverns for years, looking for a way out, and nothing had come of it yet. She knew that the stairs were securely locked and guarded by a beast in the lake, so they avoided that direction. Maybe, though, Clint would have the hunger, the burning desire to go to the magic place she had described for him, and through some mercy of heaven, he would be shown the way out. God knows a boy shouldn’t live his life in tunnels and caves.
“Why so silent?” Jackie had been walking alongside her, respecting her contemplative mood.
“What is the purpose of all this, Jackie? Are we doing something here for someone’s benefit? What possible part in God’s plan are we fulfilling? I want my son out of here. We’ve been here for years, Jackie. YEARS! Clint is probably eight years old now and he’s never even SEEN, for God’s sake. And Michael. What must he have thought, that his young wife had run away? And my parents. And my sister. Jackie, I’ve got to get out of here with my child, NOW!”
Jackie looked at her sadly. “I’ve a feeling, Sally Ann, that all this IS for a higher purpose.”
“I can’t accept that. Clint and I are going to find our way out of her—NOW!”
Suddenly she was filled with a sense of purpose, of immediacy. The drive had taken hold of her with a single-mindedness that demanded attention. She knew, deep in her soul, that Clint was old enough now to be a help, not a hindrance, and if they were ever going to do it, now was the time.
She ran back to the main cavern and found Clint. She grabbed his shoulders in both hands and put her face up next to his.
“Clint. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get up to the sunshine and the grass and the fresh air, and see your daddy. We can stay here forever, and we probably will, if we don’t make the commitment—right NOW—to get out of here. Now I’m going to pack up some moss and some water and some food, and we’re going to keep going until we find a way out of these caves. Okay? Are you ready?”
“We’ve never looked the other way.” Sally knew he meant the way of the monster in the lake. She had never returned that way, had never gone back, had never tried the stairs again. She had chosen to stay in the caves rather than risk what might be in that lake. But now she wasn’t so sure.
“Then that’s the way we’ll start. Get ready.”
They didn’t speak again until they each had bundles tied to their backs and had entered the tunnel forbidden to Clint all his life. Then he said, “Why now, all of a sudden? You were happy here until now. Don’t you want to be down here with me anymore?”
“Of course I want to be with you, honey. There are just better things for you than an old cave. I want to see your face. I want to see how much you look like your daddy.”
“You always told me Daddy would rescue us. He hasn’t though, has he? And now you want to go find him. Why? We live here. This is our home. We’re happy here. Don’t you want to be with me anymore?”
Sally stopped and reached out for him, but he avoided her touch. She was astonished at his bitterness.
“Clint...”
“Don’t! You don’t want me anymore. You just want to go chasing a dream. There is no “up there.’ There is no ‘daddy.’ There’s nothing but you and me and that’s not good enough for you. You’re a liar and I don’t want YOU any more, either!” He ran off into the darkness.
“Clint!” She screamed after him. There was no response. She kept screaming as if the echoes were her only friends.
5
Filled with a stifling terror that had built upon itself over the years, Sally Ann felt her way along the side of the tunnel toward the opening she had first come through so long ago. Still sobbing and aching for her runaway son, she had but one thing in mind—to show him the truth. How could he not believe her? When she stopped to rest there was only silence around her. She heard nothing of her son but did not worry. Clint was far more capable of navigating the winding tunnels than she. She also resisted the temptation of calling Jackie. This was a situation she would have to deal with on her own.
For the first time, doubts began to fill her mind. Maybe it was all a lie. Maybe Jackie was a lie, too. Maybe this was all a dream, a nightmare; maybe there was nothing, really, except her and the darkness. No caves, no tunnels, no Clint, no Michael, no God. Maybe she was the product of the imagination of some madman who was dreaming. Maybe she was the central character of a novel, and the imagery of the writer was strong enough to flash her into existence. How else could she explain Jackie? Was he just the product of her need? How could he be real?
“There is only one way to find out. I will prove to Clint and I will prove to myself that there is something else—something better for us than the darkness, than these damned tunnels. I will get out of here and come back for Clint.” She spoke loudly, boldly, as much to calm herself as in the hope that Clint could hear her.
She continued through the tunnel, reliving the journey from the tunnel entrance to the main cavern. She walked with her eyes closed, hoping her feet would remember the way and not let her mind guide her down the wrong tunnel, take the wrong turn at a fork, sabotage her freedom. When she was tired she slept, and when she was hungry she ate until all she had brought with her was gone. Still she walked, the ache within her abdomen a constant companion, the pain of a mother falsely accused of being dishonest with her child.
The old tennis shoes were finally rotting away, and she discarded the soles and the few strings that still held them together and continued barefoot. She soaked her cut and bleeding feet and the first stream she crossed. There she found more food and rested until she was able to continue.
Limping, stumbling, and near the end of her endurance, she sensed a wall in front of her and made her way to it. It was made of bricks! The first manmade substance she had known since leaving the stairs. Clint would have to believe her now! She felt her way along the wall and finally, hands pulling on her hair, sank to her knees. It was a dead end. The wall was solid.
She rested a while, then scavenged the tunnel floor on all fours until she found a pointed rock. Chipping away at the old mortar proved to be a tremendous task, but she kept at it consistently, resting when she was too tired to go on, and taking trips back to the stream for fresh food and water. There was no sound except her own raspy breathing, no word from Clint. She knew that she was quite lost in the underground maze, that her bearings were so far off she might never again find either the Home Cavern or the stairs. This wall was her only hope. There must be something behind it.
She worked at the cement, chipping an inch at a time, until she had loosened one whole brick. With bleeding fingers she worked the brick loose from its slot and pulled it out. Half fearing what she would find, she reached her hand in the hole and felt...more bricks. A double wall. Her soul wilted. Would she never get used to disappointment? She summoned courage and patience and kept going. Eventually she had worked an opening that was five bricks wide and seven bricks high. She began scraping at the mortar of the inner wall.
The second wall of bricks was not as solid, and by putting her foot in the opening and bracing her back, she could make the whole structure give a bit as she pushed.
She worked one brick until it became loose. She pushed it with her hand, then her foot, until it gave way and fell in. Holding her breath, she listened. Nothing. Then a splash, way, way below, and the nauseating stench of mold, must, and rotting stuff wafted through the hole.
It was an old well, and where the was a well, there was access from above. Overcoming her sickness, she doubled her efforts to push out the inner wall. With one brick gone, the wall crumbled fairly easily. Soon she had an opening big enough to crawl through.
The effort was exhausting. She sat back and rested while her mind raced ahead. Here is a way out for all of us! She thought of Jackie and called him. Instantly, he was there. He looked in the hole and pulled his head back in revulsion. “This place is diseased. You can’t crawl up there. The well has been closed up for years. I’m sure the top has been sealed.”
“I can do it. I’ve got to get Clint out of here.”
“You can’t do it. Look at you. You’re skin and bones and half dead. Do you know how you’d get up there, with no rope? And once you got to the top, then what? How are you going to open the lid? Forget it, Sally Ann.”
“I can do it and I will do it and I don’t need you telling me I can’t. Now you can help me or you can go away.”
“I won’t help you kill yourself. How fast have you been losing your teeth?” Her hand went to her mouth, to the sore gums and the holes she tried not to think about. “Come on, we can find our way back to the Home Cavern.”
“And do what? Rot? Have you ever thought what will happen to Clint after I get old and die? No, Jackie, this is our only way out.”
“What’s the difference, Sally Ann? You can die here, or you can die in that hole.”
She took his arm and looked into his eyes. He looked so sad. “Jackie, we can get out of here. All of us...”
“Not me, Sally Ann. I can’t go. I don’t know why, but when you don’t need me anymore, I think I’m going away.”
“Well, I certainly don’t need you now!”
She was instantly sorry she had said that, and had time only to see the hurt flash through Jackie’s eyes before he faded away. “Jackie? Come back. I do need you...Jackie!” But he was gone. She curled up in a corner by her pile of bricks and cried herself to sleep.
6
She took her time preparing for the journey. A plan was carefully followed and executed. She was determined to succeed. She began by eating all she could find. Each time she ate, she stuffed herself until repelled by the thought of another bite. She licked salt from the wall until tears came to her eyes, ignoring the stinging in her mouth, then drank her fill from the fresh water in the stream. She even fearlessly fished for crayfish and ate them eagerly. She continually called out for Clint to come join her, but there was never a reply. She didn’t venture out farther than the stream for fear of losing her way back to the well, but her voice carried and was so loud to her ears that she was certain he heard her. Each time the echoes rang hollowly back to her, the ache in her stomach rang with them.
She slept on a bed of moss that her body heat eventually made dry enough to be pliable. She shredded it, braided it back together, and wove a bag that she could sling over her shoulder to carry supplies, but she couldn’t make a rope strong enough to be of any use. She braided another bundle of moss to weave a kind of shirt, since her clothes were long gone and the air from the well was decidedly cool. She made a snug-fitting pair of booties and wound some more moss around her elbows and hands.
Finally, she took a deep breath and stood. She was ready. She grabbed a handful of pebbles and put her head through the wall. She threw a pebble to the opposite wall and found it to be only about three feet away. She threw a stone straight up, but could not tell by the sound whether it was bouncing off the lid or off the side. The stones fell a long way before they splashed. She pulled her head out of the opening and gave one last shout to Clint. “I’m going into the well now, Clint. I’ll bring your dad back.”
Feet first, she entered the hole and felt for the other side. The sharp bricks bruised and cut her ribs before her feet found a purchase on the opposite wall. She walked her toes down until she could slide her torso through the opening and rest her back just below the hole. Slowly, moving her feet sideways, then inching her back around, she revolved around the inside of the well so as to miss the opening on her climb up the shaft. Already she knew she was in for an endurance test the likes of which she had never encountered. Her straining back muscles screamed, and she rested, willing herself to relax, placing the weight on her straightened legs and her toes.
With her arms straight out to her sides, the weight of her whole body was on her toes and her back. She was able to give her back some relief by raising herself up on her hands a little. The rough surface of the well wall helped. She was afraid her shoulders or elbows might give way, though, so this was only a momentary respite.
Up and up, through the vertical tunnel that had no ending and no beginning, she focused her mind on freedom and light and laughter in the sunshine and willed her bruised and torn back to go just one more inch, then one more, and another after that. She ate from her store and rested often, afraid of falling asleep, afraid of not falling asleep. Eventually she had blackout periods where she lost consciousness, and she was sure it was her mind insisting on the sleep she was denying it. Each time she awakened, her knees were locked tight and secure, but it was still startling, and her heart pounded.
Except for the loosened chunks of mortar and dirt splashing in the water far below, the only sound in the well was her echoed breathing. Now and then she heard a soft scuttling noise, but she refused to let her mind dwell on what might be making such a sound. She finally removed the moss shirt she had made when the moss became embedded in the lacerations on her back. This exertion was enough to make her pant for breath and stay still until the dizziness left her. She put what was left of the bloody moss into her bag and continued her ascent after her head had cleared.
Feeling faint and frail, she stopped and considered going back to the tunnel, but she wasn’t sure how far she had come, nor was she sure how far she had to go. The blackness was absolute. Going down would be as bad as going up, she reasoned, so she might as well make for the top. Giving up would be the same either way. Archeologists would either find her bones wedged in the well shaft like a prop, or they would find them at the bottom. She felt the rough brick biting into her shoulders as she continued, and whispered a little prayer that thundered in the silence. Time for a rest. Just a little sleep. She knew she was in danger of hallucinating from lack of sleep and that her mind wasn’t functioning clearly, so she wedged herself in very tightly and planned to rest there for a while. Sleep came quickly.
When she awoke, there were insects crawling over her legs. She screamed and brushed at her legs with her shoulder bag. “Oh, God! Get them off of me!” Cockroaches. They were two inches long, attracted by the smell of the rotting slugs in her bag and the blood and raw flesh of her feet and back. At her violent movements they scurried away—to wait. She suppressed the bile rising in her throat and knew that if she allowed herself to be surprised like that again, she would be likely to fall. Then the venomous little beasts could feast.